IDENTITIES AND RESISTANCE. THE ANCIENT CALIFORNIANS AND THE JESUIT MISSIONARY SYSTEM IN THE 18TH CENTURY.

 

Author: Sealtiel Enciso Pérez

With the arrival of Jesuit missionaries to the California peninsula in October 1697, the process of colonization and domination over the ancient inhabitants of these latitudes began. The purpose that motivated these religious figures was the evangelization of all "gentiles" with the aim of winning them for "eternal glory". This process had to involve a series of stages that were well-known to these religious figures, as they had had the opportunity to generate an entire system around the so-called "reductions" in different parts of the world (Asia and South America).

However, this process of "acculturation", as Ignacio del Río Chávez calls it, was not without controversy with the natives, among which we can mention their reluctance to abandon polygamy as well as their spiritual beliefs, which were considered "demonic" by the Ignatians. On many occasions, there were confrontations that did not result in bloodshed due to the support provided to the religious figures by the soldiers who guarded them, but that clearly established that this process would not be peaceful.

"The concept of identity cannot be separated from the notion of culture since identities can only be formed from the different cultures and subcultures to which one belongs or in which one participates." In the case of the ethnic groups that settled in the southern half of the California peninsula: Pericúes, Guaycuras, and Cochimíes, they had established a culture based on empirical knowledge of nature, which had been accumulating for thousands of years. At the same time, they developed cultural traits that made them distinguishable from each other, such as language, cosmogony, clothing, celebrations, funeral rituals, and others. Having certainty in their way of life and perpetuating and improving it from one generation to another guaranteed their survival, domination over the hunting and fishing grounds on which they subsisted, and, in general, was what made them feel proud and fulfilled in terms of their purpose in life in this peninsula.

With the introduction of the mission reduction system, "the Jesuit monks sought to evangelize the Indians, but also their cooperation in the defense of the borders. Faced with the changes imposed by evangelization: rejecting their beliefs, abandoning their semi-nomadic customs, being controlled in their work..., they 'allowed' them to maintain their language - only to use it among themselves, since they had to use Latin to deal with the priests - and 'allowed' certain power to the caciques, chiefs, of each community." This obviously caused a great number of positions on the part of the leaders of these ethnicities. There were some who accepted them gladly since they saw no problem in accepting modifications to their way of life and, in return, received free and constant food. However, there were also other members who saw a danger looming over their way of life by forcing them to abandon polygamy and some traditional festivities considered by the religious figures as "lustful and lascivious," which threatened procreation and the perpetuation of the group.

In the exercise of resistance, "the subjects reflect hostilities, frictions, and struggles that arise as a product of differences in identification, purposes, tendencies, and individual and collective interests." This was fully and explicitly demonstrated by the "guamas" or witches of the different groups of gentiles who openly and provocatively showed reluctance to accept evangelization as well as the culture brought by the recently arrived religious. Their struggle was not only personal, but they also constantly pressured their fellow citizens to abandon the emerging settlements and, before doing so, to destroy the constructions erected and to assassinate those members of the tribes who had turned their backs on their ancestral beliefs and way of life.

The Jesuits had gone through thousands of vicissitudes to obtain authorization from the viceroy of New Spain to begin evangelization in these lands of the northwestern part of New Spain, and they were not going to give up against these onslaughts. "All kinds of resources that were handled through the mission institution were to be used above all for the fulfillment of the evangelizing function. This instance required a functional diversification of the missions, which, in order to ensure the viability of the evangelizing process, had to necessarily use those same resources to counteract the nomadism of the Californians by linking them economically and, therefore, socially with the sedentary population centers that tended to develop in each mission headquarters. It is obvious that achieving this, thus fixing the mobile indigenous population, even if imperfectly, in order to promote continuity of contact, involved in any case a correlative alteration of the cultural traditions of nomadic peoples whose practice had until then depended on the survival of the Californians." The main weapon of the religious was to seek to win the will and friendship of the natives by giving them food. Another of their strategies was the early learning of their language, which they achieved by studying a catechism elaborated by the priest Copart during the time he was in Real de San Bruno between the years 1683 and 1685, where he translated various prayers into the language spoken by the natives of Loreto.

With the passage of time and in the face of the insistence of the religious, the different rancherías that surrounded the town of Loreto were giving in to their ostracism and accepting the new mission system that was being implanted. The religious initiated the process of evangelization of the indigenous people through catechesis and baptism, an act by which the commitment of the natives to abandon their pagan practices was sealed, putting as a witness of this the God of the newcomers. As the Californians accepted living in the mission settlements, they began to learn the different ways and forms of living in the new society that was imposed on them: they began to wear clothes, changed their eating habits, established religious marriage and monogamy as a way of regulating the beginning of family life, substituted their ancestral polytheistic beliefs for the new Catholic catechism, and gradually entered into the culture brought by the Europeans.

Acculturation is understood as "those phenomena that result when groups of individuals from different cultures come into continuous and firsthand contact, with consequent changes in the original patterns of one or both groups." This concept can definitely be applied to the encounter of European culture through Jesuit evangelization with the culture held by the human groups that inhabited the southern part of the Baja California peninsula.

From my personal perspective, few historians have delved into the process and stages that were experienced in this acculturation. Generally, most research on the history of the 70 years of the Jesuit missionary stage in our peninsula and its impact on indigenous groups focuses on the works of Juan Jacobo Baegert, Miguel del Barco, Miguel Venegas, and Francisco Javier Clavijero, where Californios, the name the religious baptized the inhabitants they found on this peninsula, are perceived as having a very primitive level of intelligence, lacking civilization features such as writing, architectural works, social, political and established military system, a consolidated family system, and many other things that placed them among the poorest ethnic groups in the geography of New Spain.

It goes without saying that by describing the natives in this way in their chronicles and letters that they regularly sent to their civil and ecclesiastical authorities, it authorized their priests and sent representatives of the Crown to exercise de facto guardianship over them and to disappear or at least leave at the discretion of the missionary the rights that had been consecrated in different documents elaborated by the Spanish monarchs and that were applicable to the ancestral inhabitants of these lands.

When analyzing the works of the aforementioned authors, we find aspects of the personality and culture of the members of the different ethnic groups in which they coincide, but we also appreciate substantive differences. For example, in the work of the Alsatian Baegert, the natives are described as follows: "As a general rule, it can be said of the Californians that they are foolish, clumsy, rough, dirty, insolent, ungrateful, liars, crooks, extremely lazy, big talkers, and, in terms of their intelligence and activities, like children until the grave; that they are disoriented, unprepared, thoughtless, and irresponsible; people who cannot be controlled in any way and who follow their natural instincts in everything, like beasts." In contrast, Miguel de Barco finds a good amount of virtues and skills in the Californios as he describes in this paragraph of his work: "The time of the pitahaya harvest was like the time of their grape harvest. They were happier and more joyful than in all the rest of the year. 'The three months of pitahaya (says the venerable Father Salvatierra) are like in some lands of Europe the times of Carnival, in which men in a good part lose themselves. Thus these natives lose themselves, giving themselves completely to their parties, dances, feasts of distant ranches, and their genres of comedies and buffooneries that they do, in which they can spend entire nights with laughter and celebration, being the actors those who best know how to mimic, which they do with great property. As for the dances, the same father noted that they had great variety and no little skill. We had here (he says) the Christmas Easter celebrations with great pleasure and devotion, and also of the Indians, with some hundreds of catechumens attending the celebrations, also making their dances the little Christians, more than a hundred. And their dances are very different from those used by the nations on the other side, for they have more than thirty dances, all different, and all in the figure, rehearsal, and teaching of some essential things for war, fishing, walking, burying, carrying, and similar things; and the four and three-year-old child prides himself on doing well in his dance role, as if they were already young men of much emulation and judgment: something that gave us all much amusement to see them."

These contradictions arise primarily from the personalities of the writers, as both through their writings show us their attitudes. On the one hand, Baegert's bilious and bitter attitude, and on the other hand, Del Barco's erudite and scholastic attitude. However, both documents still reflect the vision of the "noble savage" based on Aristotle's teachings in his work "Politics," in which Californians were considered nothing more than "servants by nature." Therefore, the concept of domination by the missionaries began to take shape, to which they sought to adhere throughout their stay in these lands. Max Weber states the following about this concept: "Not all domination uses economic means. And even less does all domination have economic goals. But domination over a plurality of men requires, as a normal mode (not absolutely always), an administrative framework, that is, the probability, in which one can trust, that there will be an activity, directed at the execution of its general orders and specific mandates."

In most cases, the missionaries promoted the cultural change of Californians peacefully, through good manners and the giving of gifts. Here we describe an example: "But this great man (Juan de Ugarte), animated by true zeal, not content with teaching them the mysteries of the Christian religion and trying to root out from their hearts the attachment they had to their teachers and their old superstitions, took on the arduous task of civilizing them, teaching them those arts and customs required by social life. What he had to endure from men accustomed to perpetual idleness and unrestrained freedom can be imagined to some extent, but cannot be expressed sufficiently." However, when they encountered resistant or aggressive attitudes, they did not hesitate to convince the newly baptized to betray the most reluctant leaders and to ask soldiers to inflict severe punishments on them. On this last point, the Ignatians also devised stratagems that earned them the respect and affection of the natives for their magnanimity in suspending some punishments or commuting them for severe reprimands, as described below: "Through the interpreter, he admonished them for their crimes, for which, if he did not impose the punishment they deserved, he sentenced them to public flogging for a few days, so that they would learn to live in peace and not harm those from whom they did not receive help. It was known that ten or twelve of these prisoners were the main and most guilty in the riots and deaths already mentioned, and against them, the punishment was decreed. They were taken outside to receive it in the sight of the people of the mission, but after receiving eight or ten lashes, Father Linck came out and asked the executioner to pardon them for the remaining lashes. He made them understand that they should be grateful to the father for interceding for them, because otherwise, he would make them suffer at least twenty-five lashes each day, returning them to the prison, where the missionary father provided them with food. The next day they were taken out again to receive their penance in front of everyone, and the same thing happened as before; after a few lashes, the father interceded for them, the lashes stopped, and they were returned to the stocks. With this penance, they continued for seven or eight days until the punishment gradually softened those hard hearts and softened the ferocity of those barbarians who, in the first days, had shown impatience and anger, as if to indicate that if they were free, they would know how to avenge themselves well for the treatment they were receiving now."

The Californios were far from passively and willingly accepting the modifications that the Jesuits proposed to their way of life and identity. From the first encounters, there were more or less marked disagreements in which the natives clearly showed that they accepted the gifts of food, clothes, and other trinkets offered by the Missionaries but were far from willing to accept the abandonment of their way of life, beliefs, and culture. In many of these disagreements, if it were not for the presence of soldiers and the use of firearms and dogs, to which the natives were very afraid, who knows how the fate of the settlers would have been. They would likely have perished under the rain of arrows, stones, and spears that the Californios used in their battles with enemies. In the following account, one understands what I mention: "The principal and loudest was that the heathens, who lived about thirty or more leagues to the north of San Borja, having heard that a father had been established in Adac, and that the people of those vicinity had already become Christians, and this reduction was spreading rapidly northward from Adac, and that the heathens who mediated between them and the Christians, were not only in peace and friendship with them, but also showed or had declared wanting to follow the same example, they became so angry against them that, convening others of their neighbors, they determined to make war on them with blood and fire and kill them all, to prevent them from becoming Christians, wanting to see them dead rather than with a new religion so contrary to their barbaric customs. With this intention, these enemies of the Christian name, as precious as they were brave, attacked a peaceful Indian rancheria, killed some, and the others fled. Later, they attacked other rancherias, or several other rancherias, in which they killed a large number of people who seemed already close to receiving the Holy Faith."

Every time these priests initiated a new exploration or established a mission nucleus, great turmoil was unleashed among the natives, where they subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, showed their rejection of the arrival of these colonists and the culture they tried to impose. In the following Jesuit chronicle, this rejection is evident: "When we left this rancheria, about a stone's throw away, we saw a pitahaya plant, all torn apart, smashed, and some larger pieces of it were stuck to the ground with stakes or sharpened sticks. What the friendly Indians and practical Spaniards interpreted as done to declare us enemies and declare war on us. We went with all care to the rancheria of Anirituhué, whose inhabitants were here in Aripité."

These acts of resistance by the natives were incessantly repeated and culminated in the great Pericú Rebellion of 1734, where priests Carrancó and Tamaral were killed, along with dozens of natives who had already been baptized, and the destruction of the temples of the towns of Santiago, San José del Cabo, Todos Santos, and La Paz. This movement involved a large number of natives and practically the entire territory explored by the Jesuits. The colonization of California was on the verge of being definitively lost. In this paragraph written by the priest Clavijero, the fury with which the natives expressed their hatred towards one of the murdered priests is expressed: "Father Carranco had just said mass, and had retired to his room to pray the office, where the Indians found him on his knees. He stood up to read the letter they brought him from Father Tamaral, and when he was reading it attentively, the group of conspirators entered; two of them immediately seized him and took him out of the house, holding him suspended by his habit, while the others shot their arrows at him. Then, with sticks and stones, they finished taking the little life he had left, becoming more cruelly enraged against him when they saw him in a state of not being able to defend himself." Fortunately, the arrival of military reinforcements from Sonora and Sinaloa led by Manuel Bernal Huidobro, Governor of Sinaloa, achieved the apparent pacification of these bellicose groups and the punishment of the main ringleaders.

There were constant displays of rebellion by the Californians, either by attempting to kill priests or through uprisings of rancherías motivated by some dissatisfied sorcerer upon seeing their subsistence disappearing and the lack of followers for their beliefs, which they directly attributed to the exhortations of the missionaries towards the catechumens. In addition to the above, neophytes were obliged to destroy their traditional cult objects as a show of repentance and their desire to follow the Christian life, as expressed in this paragraph: "On another occasion, they brought the father a large package containing the adornments and pagan instruments they use in their celebrations, to burn it, as is customary when they come to be baptized."

As an example of the resistance and retaliation actions carried out by the Californios against the insistence of religious figures to change their way of life, the following is described: "Father Wagner sought to put an end to witchcraft in his mission as soon as possible. This incurred the hatred of some witches and their followers, to the point where they attempted to take his life. However, since almost all of the people in the mission were content and highly valued their missionary, the conspirators did not dare to attack him openly. One night, shortly after dark, the father had sat down by the door of his little house to relieve the heat. Seizing the opportunity, one of the malcontents hid a few steps away and fired an arrow at him. Although the father was not injured, the arrow immediately passed by his head and hit the wall of the stone house with such force that it was embedded in it."

Narratives that recount the process of domination experienced by the Californios and how they gradually lost their identity until they completely disappeared with the death of all of them are interesting.

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